This is the first time I am working on a LEED EBO&M project and I had the following question: if the bathrooms on two floors only are being renovated in a 7 story bldg. do you enter the FTE of the whole building or just the employees of each floor as 2 seperate groups. If two separate groups, one of the floors has the cafeteria that serves the whole building. does that mean I need to enter the FTE for the entire building on this floor?
Also, all the fixtures except two are prior to 1993, am I correct to assume automatically that the fixtures have to be replaced because the flow is higher than the baseline set by UPC/IPC? The owner is interested to see if he can meet the pre-requisite w/out replacing the fixtures using the 160% benchmark. I just cannot seem to figure this one out. Thank you for all the help.
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Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
May 12, 2011 - 9:18 pm
Hi Suha,
In your situation, it sounds like the simplest approach would be to have enter two fixture groups: 1 for the renovated floors, and 1 for the non-renovated floors. You would only include as FTE the occupants that spend the majority of their days on that floors (so not cafeteria-only users). In reality, some of those folks would be using the restrooms on those floors, but there's not really a clean way to account for it.
Alternatively, you could use one fixture group and calculate the weighted average flush rate for the fixtures through the building.
Regarding your other question, I've worked on projects that can maybe sneak by the prerequisite by looking at aerators (0.5 gpm) on the lav faucets, and 1.6 or 1.8 gpm on any break room sinks. Usually, at least some of the toilets or urinals would need upgrading as well to hit the prerequisite, but it really depends on how bad the old fixtures are.